Imaging the Volve ocean-bottom field data with the Upside-down
Rayleigh-Marchenko method
Abstract
Ocean-bottom seismic acquisitions are gaining widespread popularity for
various subsurface applications. However, the high cost of these systems
often necessitates receiver geometries with large intervals between
ocean-bottom cables or nodes. The upside-down Rayleigh-Marchenko (UD-RM)
method has been recently proposed as an effective solution for accurate
redatuming and imaging of sparse seabed data. In this paper, we present
the first successful application of the UD-RM method to field data. We
demonstrate that in the presence of a shallow seabed, an improved data
pre-processing workflow is necessary to generate more accurate input
wavefields than those produced by the workflow in the original paper. To
validate the proposed processing workflow, the UD-RM method is initially
tested on a synthetic dataset mimicking the Volve field data, followed
by its application to a 2D line of the Volve ocean-bottom cable dataset.
Subsequently, the field dataset is subsampled by retaining only
25\% of the total receivers to numerically validate the
UD-RM method’s capability to handle sparse receiver arrays. The
resulting images reveal that the UD-RM method, when paired with our
enhanced data processing workflow, can effectively handle
surface-related multiples, internal multiples, and sparse receiver
arrays, producing accurate imaging results without the need for costly
and labor-intensive multiple removal processes. Finally, we provide
theoretical insights and numerical evidence supporting the necessity of
source-side deghosting prior to redatuming. While a pre-processing
workflow that omits source-side deghosting can offers some practical
advantages, we show that this ultimately produces blurrier images
compared to those obtained using source-side deghosted input data.